Jimmy Savile: how do paedophiles get away with it?

How do paedophiles get away with it? In Jimmy Savile’s case, we know there were stories circulating about his child abuse among BBC colleagues. “It was always said that Jimmy likes them young,” a veteran broadcaster told the Telegraph. One former BBC producer said: "I know for a fact that Jimmy spent a night in a rather squalid hotel with a girl who was at the most 12, or probably 10…”

So why did no one put an end to it? The answer won’t necessarily be an obvious one. Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in the New Yorker recently that “a paedophile is someone adept not just at preying on children but at confusing, deceiving, and charming the adults responsible for those children”.

Gladwell’s piece, headlined "In Plain View: How child molesters get away with it", is worth reading for one reason alone: it reveals precisely how paedophiles operate. The average child abuser is not, says Gladwell, a “dishevelled old man baldly offering candy to preschoolers”. Rather, they can be highly popular, charismatic – almost canonised by the community they live in.

Gladwell tells the story of Jerry Sandusky, a convicted child molester who was assistant football coach at Pennsylvania State University from 1969 to 1999. Like Jimmy Savile, Sandusky was a philanthropist. He founded The Second Mile, a charity that served Pennsylvania’s underprivileged youth – and he used that organisation, as well as his football coaching, to select vulnerable boys, groom them, and abuse them.

It becomes clear, in Sandusky’s case, that he wasn’t a football coach or philanthropist by coincidence. He was those two things because he was a paedophile, and because they gave him access to children he could abuse, all the while earning him the trust of adults. Gladwell makes the wider point: “Paedophiles cluster in professions that give them access to vulnerable children – teaching, the clergy, medicine.”

To me, what has emerged over the last few days proves that Jimmy Savile was not involved in children’s television and other popular TV shows by coincidence, but because they allowed him to select, groom and abuse young girls. In part, he got away with it because the Jimmy Savile public persona – the loveable, slightly creepy eccentric – was enough to distract from his very real crimes. Most people gave him the benefit of the doubt.

After Sandusky's conviction, an independent report confirmed that senior university officials had known about allegations of his abuse, but were complicit in failing to disclose them.

Did Jimmy Savile’s BBC bosses, and the people who knew he preyed on underage girls, do everything they could do stop him? If not, they should explain why.